


Meaningless

by Jake_the_space_cat



Series: A Creature of Pride (transmasc!Kim AU) [2]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, Motorsports, Pre-Canon, Precinct 57, Racing, Role Models, TipTop - Freeform, Trans Character, Trans Kim Kitsuragi, Trans Male Character, young!Kim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:54:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29741130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jake_the_space_cat/pseuds/Jake_the_space_cat
Summary: If you don’t remember where you were when Alfie Deletraz died, you aren’t a real TipTop fan.
Series: A Creature of Pride (transmasc!Kim AU) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2160411
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Meaningless

**Author's Note:**

> Another young!Kim story, where I play fast and loose with timelines and Kim joined the RCM at 15.
> 
> The basic racing events and some of the commentator's dialogue are taken directly from the death of Formula One racer Ayrton Senna. Thanks to the Formula-One-fluent DE fic writers for getting me newbie-informed on Formula One!
> 
> Given that Revachol seems to be culturally in the '90s in-game, Deletraz's death is likely supposed to be very recent, but I've cheated and made it not *quite* as long ago as Senna's death in 1994, but close.
> 
> I tend to write in fragments and bounce around in time and AUs, so I've got [a masterlist of chronology for all of my DE pieces here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Mfej90pwfLsLANPI3nuLRqnoAc8u3DW1vgy3icTK-w/edit#gid=0).

“And Deletraz! F---!” Everyone in the sports bar turns to stare at the radio as the censor bleep pierces the room. Kim Kitsuragi’s 18, just old enough to drink. He *has* a drink, because he’s a paying customer, and only paying customers get to take up space and listen to the neighborhood’s strongest receiver tuned to the Puerto Azul Grand Prix.

He’s not drinking. TipTop is sacred ground. Kim stays absolutely, religiously sober for every one of the Grand Prix races.

“What the hell just happened? He’s gone off the track! Deletraz has gone off the track. He’s plunged straight into the retaining wall. I didn’t see him try to turn. That’s almost 190 miles per hour, straight into a concrete wall. And Vanderson and Nobu are coming around the corner, they’re driving right through the debris.”

The bar’s dead. Even the few customers who aren’t there for the race know something’s going on.

“And Irw’s taken the lead. He’s taken the lead from Deletraz. But the important thing right now is--Deletraz is still in the car. There’s no medical attention, I don’t see any medical attention.”

Kim leans in as hard as he can towards the radio, halfway across the room, as though if he could focus on it hard enough, he could see back over the airwaves, through the pale, all the way to the circuit. Even with his vision.

“We have cameras here trying to get a better view. We can see Deletraz in the car, his helmet is still on. We’ve got the red flag now, the race is stopped.”

“Did Deletraz just move? I think he moved, I think I just saw--”

A second’s hesitation. “Yes. I think I just saw a twitch.” The commentator’s voice drops in one phrase from incredulous excitement to complete tonelessness. The taut sound of a voice trying not to express emotion. It’s one of the most terrible things Kim has ever heard, and he’s been working with the RCM for three years already. He’s heard plenty of people trying to reshape terrible things into something they can articulate, something that doesn’t acknowledge that the worst may have already happened.

“I think he just twitched his head. That’s a good sign. I’m sure that’s a good sign.”

Kim sits back on the wooden bench he’s crammed onto, side-by-side with more racing fans than it was ever intended to seat. He’s no longer leaning intently towards the radio, elbows on the sticky tabletop. Every muscle -- every neuron -- in his body is slack. There’s a sound in his head like the long empty ring of tinnitus.

 _Deletraz is dead._ That’s what that tone of voice means. Deletraz is dead, and everyone lucky or rich enough to be at Puerto Azul watching the race can tell. The commentators know, but they don’t want to say it. Not until it’s absolutely confirmed. Not until it’s undeniable.

They keep talking--space-filling noise about other cars going off the tracks in the past, about the arrival of the medical team, about how you can barely see Deletraz for all the doctors and first-responders working on him and how that has to be an encouraging sign--they’re getting him stabilized, remember they saw that twitch earlier, that means he’s able to move, everything’s going to be fine. Look, there’s aerostatic medical support, coming in to airlift him to a hospital. He’ll get great care there, he’ll pull through.

The race restarts. Irw, Deletraz’s polar opposite and longtime rival, wins.

Kim goes home.

He has a closet of an apartment now, his own space for the first time in his life. He’s enormously proud of it. He’s made it as pristine as a roach-infested pre-Revolutionary building in one of the worst parts of town allows. He's determined to keep it that way.

It’s Sunday. Usually Saturday and Sunday are busy days for the RCM, but he asked for today off specifically so he could listen to the race.

He spends the rest of the day and into the night listening to his own unreliable radio.

They confirm Deletraz’s death at 8 pm.

The next day, they confirm that Deletraz had truly died - his brain smashed within his skull, brainstem severed, no hope of anything after that but sustaining the breath in an empty body - there on the circuit, with that final twitch.

The video footage becomes publicly available the next week. Kim sees the twitch, the last gasp of a spattered nervous system, the stillness afterwards. The quick moment when the camera pulls back far enough to reveal a spreading pool of blood on the ground and then quickly corrects, to focus back on the huddle of doctors surrounding Deletraz.

Kim’s seen death, even as a junior officer. You aren’t always there for the moment when it happens, with the RCM, but you usually arrive not too long after. They’re usually mundane things. ODs. Medical crises. Accidents.

But this is the first time he’s felt a hero die since that time when he was 12 and it finally hit home that all of his favorite Revolutionary pilots, the ones he’d been reading about since he was old enough to read, were long dead.

Deletraz had been a great racer. Calm, collected. Strategic. Confident but never in a way meant for the cameras. Always in control. Poised. He’d come up from a working-class family, gotten into kart racing. Made his way to TipTop through talent and persistence alone.

You didn’t say this kind of thing out loud when you were 18, but Deletraz had been exactly the kind of man Kim wanted to be when he grew up.

* * *

He doesn’t talk about it at work with the other TipTop fans in the precinct or at vocational school. He doesn’t buy any of the memorabilia that springs up in shops overnight.

He starts following Jacob Irw, who’s an absolute maverick and who Kim thinks is possibly insane, just because Irw is most of what remains of Deletraz. They’d been rivals for years, even during the short time when they were teammates. In Irw’s interviews, Kim can hear the same sense of emptiness and incomprehension he feels.

“He was just--he was an incredible racer. I don’t know…” Irw always has something to say, even if it makes no sense, but he can’t find the end of his sentence for a long moment. “We know we can go at any time. It’s part of the sport. But then it happens, and you’re just… You’re just left behind. In the dust. It’s…” Irw is as close to religious as a Dolorian can get, a true devout; every fan knows that, so what he says next isn’t a surprise. “After life, death. After death, life again. I just tell myself that.”

“But sometimes, when I say it now, I don’t know what it means.”


End file.
